Episode 12: Staking Mondays with Tushar Aggarwal of Persistence & pSTAKE

Staking Mondays is a weekly show to share knowledge from key staking industry leaders with our community. Powered by StakingRewards.com

At Staking Rewards, we are helping investors to navigate the landscape of yield-generating digital assets and finding the best opportunities to earn interest on your crypto.

One of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Asia, Tushar Aggarwal wears many hats: He started the crypto podcast Decrypt Asia, works as a venture scout with LuneX Ventures, and runs Persistence, a platform that lets users earn liquidity rewards while they stake coins.

Persistence is an interoperable protocol built to facilitate the creation of next-gen financial products. The Persistence tech stack provides the infrastructure to effectively bridge the realms of DeFi and traditional finance in a variety of areas, whilst also enabling the creation of innovative crypto-facing solutions to expand the DeFi and NFT sectors.

pStake is set to be released on September 20th and it is a liquid staking protocol built for unlocking the liquidity for the locked PoS assets such as $ETH $ATOM $DOT $LUNA $SOL

Questions:

01:51 Which crypto project spiked your interest first outside of BTC and ETH? And why?

04:45 Regarding Persistence mainnet, Staking Rewards data suggests over 80% of eligible XPRT are being Staked - what factors help you achieve this high rate?

07:43 Shifting gears to pSTAKE - this protocol will allow for the issuance of representative tokens on Ethereum which are backed 1:1 by native assets staked on PoS chains, these stkTOKENs can then be utilized in the vast DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum. What validators will support these cross chain staking responsibilities and what does this selection process look like?

11:05 pSTAKE will support the major PoS networks including Cosmos, Terra, Polkadot, Solana and Ethereum 2.0. What is your evaluation process when selecting new networks?

14:32 How can stkTOKENs help users unlock the benefits of staking returns while avoiding the lockup periods associated with traditional unbonding times from PoS networks?.

19:28 Transferring stkTOKENs to a different wallet address triggers an automatic rewards claim. Are there any thresholds for rewards and who covers the gas costs of transfers?

21:20 What secondary products could be built with or utilize stkTOKENs?

24:52 STAKE’s governance token — $PSTAKE was recently announced - tell us about the economic benefits to holders of this token.

26:10 What do you think will the landscape for liquid staking solutions / derivatives will look like in 2 or 3 years ? How many solutions will gain significant market share?

31:30 What are the dynamics between pStake, Persistence, and Audit.One? Could there be a potential conflict of interest?

38:28 What is the best Yield Opportunity currently available within the Persistence ecosystem?